“There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.” –Robert Benchley
Hebrews 11:1-16; Genesis 12:1-9
Early 20th century humorist Robert Benchley once proposed what he called “The Law of Distinction,” which goes something like this: “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.” I love how Benchley pokes fun at our human tendency to perceive the world in dichotomous, Manichean terms of black versus white, good versus evil, Republican versus Democrat, Beatles lovers versus Elvis lovers… Well, you get the picture.
We’re really good at putting ourselves and others into categories, often with disastrous results. We all know how “us versus them” thinking, based on false assumptions and stereotypes, can drive a wedge between people that can lead to anything from ridicule to outright warfare. We humans aren’t very good at this kind of categorizing because our knowledge and perception are so limited.
But God has no such limitations and the story of Scripture is the story about how God is distinctive from humans and the story about how God makes distinctions between those humans based on their response to God. God warns us about making judgments about others (a la Jesus in Matthew 7:1-5) but it’s clear that God judges us based on the criteria of faithfulness to God and God’s way in the world.
The poster boy for faithfulness to God in the early part of the Bible is Abram/Abraham. Well, poster boy may be pushing it here. Abram’s more like poster geezer since the patriarch was so old that, as Paul said, he was “as good as dead” (Roman 4:19). In fact it’s because of his advanced age, his barren wife, and his nomadic life that Abraham becomes the prototype of those who would be God’s kind of people — people who follow God in faith as opposed to the other kind of people who would rather sit still in fear and put their faith in safety, security, and self-serving ways of life.
The story of Abraham is really the story of God launching the Adam project all over again, this time working with one man through whom God was going to begin his rescue plan for the creation. Abraham comes out of Ur in Mesopotamia, out of that same land that the Tower of Babel, and it is Abraham’s destiny, and the destiny of his offspring, to scatter. But notice what their mission was in scattering. “I will bless you,” God says to Abraham, “so that through you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” God will reboot the creation project through another family, where the curses of Genesis 3 can be reversed by blessings.
But God isn’t going to force someone to do this. The only way the blessings get actualized is if the one God calls is faithful to the promises of God. In Scripture, the word “covenant” expresses this faithful relationship. God makes a covenant with Abraham—a covenant that God guarantees in blood in Genesis 15, walking through the bloody sacrifices as a sign that God will follow through on his end of the covenant—but Abraham’s faithful response is the key to the whole project. The offer of God to Abraham is contingent upon him stepping out in faith. The question that hangs there in the first several verses of chapter 12 is whether Abraham will choose faithful obedience or security. It’s the choice that we, Abraham’s spiritual descendants, are called to make as well. There really are two kinds of people in God’s eyes.
Some famous people have picked up on this kind of distinction between the faithful and the futile and we’ll use some of their quotes to track the story of Abram as the kind of person God puts in his category of distinction. Think of these quotes as the frames upon which to read the story.
“There are two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says in the end, “Thy will be done.” –C.S. Lewis
In other words, it’s the difference between “Thy will be done” people and “Have it your way” people. God called Abram in Genesis 12 to pick up everything and start walking west to the land that God would show him (12:1). You have to wonder if there were others that God had approached with this deal to start following God and receive an immense blessing that would be passed on to the rest of the world. How many nomadic patriarchs in Ur may have been offered this deal and turned it down in favor of dying fat, dumb, and happy in their tents surrounded by sheep with that being the sum total of their lives?
One of the most important verses in the whole Bible is found there in Genesis 12:4, where it says, “So Abram went as the Lord had told him…” Without questioning God, without needing to have the itinerary all set in advance, with no guarantees other than God’s future blessing, “Abram went” as a member of the first “Thy will be done” category of people.
That doesn’t mean that Abram still didn’t hedge his bets some, however. His fear of death, in spite of God’s promise, gets him in trouble in Egypt (12:10-20). He questions God’s promise of a son (15:1-3) and when God tells Abraham and Sarah that they are going to finally have the son promised by God in their old age, they both respond by laughing incredulously (17:17; 18:12). Yet when God tells Abraham to offer up that long-awaited son on Mount Moriah, Abraham responds by faithfully carrying out God’s command (22:1-19). We don’t have time today to cover the story in detail, but read through Genesis 12-22 this week to see how it unfolds. Abraham appears to be alternately shaky and strong in his early walk with God and yet because he chose to follow God he is blessed (12:1-3; 14:19-20; 22:15-18).
Abraham is faithful to God, a “Thy will be done” kind of person, but he shows us that being in that category isn’t always easy. Indeed, God makes these same kinds of offers throughout Scripture to people who would much rather have minded their own business because it was easier to do so. Moses was a stuttering murderer hiding out in the desert. Gideon was hiding from the enemy in a threshing pit when God called him to battle the Midianites with clay jars and torches. Jeremiah was just a boy when God gave him the mission of proclaiming his judgment on his people. In each case, and in many others in Scripture, the initial response to God’s call is a resounding, “Huh?” It’s easy to see why some of these people we call heroes of the faith heard God’s call and begged off at first. What you’re asking me to do, God, is crazy. They could have opted out, maybe claiming an eye problem, as in “I just can’t see myself doing that, God.” But they did it anyway. Jesus called his disciples with the simple invitation, “Follow me,” but there were those who chose not to do so, like the rich young ruler (Mark 10:17-27). In that case, as in many others, God in Christ simply said to him, “All right, have it your way.”
In a “have it your way” world, following God isn’t popular or easy. Jesus reminded his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount that they would be persecuted on account of their relationship with him. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “When Christ bids a man, he bids him come and die.” It’s a call to start walking without knowing the destination. Now, God does allow us to have it our way if we want. Indeed, throughout Scripture, God often disciplines people by giving them exactly what they want. But, as Hebrews 11 tells us, it’s only those whose response to God is “Thy will be done” who actually advance God’s project and extend blessing to the world. Where in your life do you need to surrender yourself to God and say, “Thy will be done?”
“My grandfather once told me that there are two kind of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition” – Indira Ghandi
Those who are in the “have it your way” category of life are likely to always seek credit for their accomplishments or take credit for the accomplishments of others in their charge. Their anthem is Frank Sinatra’s My Way and their life is bound up in the rewards of money, titles, and possessions.
“Thy will be done” people, on the other hand, are those who recognize that in God’s eyes their self-made accomplishments and titles add up to nothing. They know that the only thing that matters to God is their faithfulness and the work that matters to God always follows that faithfulness. Abraham received credit from God not because he had done so many great things (as we’ve already seen) but because Abraham believed in God’s promise and, despite his anxiety and doubt, stuck to that belief. Abraham “believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (15:6).
The only credit we can ever get from God comes in the form of the gift of God’s grace in response to our faith. We then respond to God’s grace by shifting the focus of our work from getting credit for ourselves to working out God’s grace through us to others. That’s the whole idea of the Abraham story: we are blessed so that, through us, that blessing can be shared with the whole world. To put it another way, God’s grace always comes to us on its way to someone else. We can never simply hold on to it ourselves like a credit or a title. “Christian” is less a status than it is a vocation!
What have you done with the amazing credit of grace God has offered you in faith? Are you sharing it or hoarding it? Are you simply “counting your blessings” or are you looking at ways to multiply them in the lives of others?
“When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened” –John M. Richardson, Jr.
It’s interesting that the lectionary skips verses 12-16 in Genesis 15, preferring instead to simply focus on the promise of God rather than God’s warning about the difficulties that will come on Abraham’s descendants. Abraham’s offspring will be “aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years” (15:13). Faithfulness to God is no guarantee that life will be without hardship, nor is it a panacea for suffering and pain. Abraham’s people would undergo generations of pain, not only as slaves in Egypt but also as a result of their own apostasy and sin that would lead them into exile in Babylon many years after their arrival in the promised land. We could say, along with John Richardson, that they let those things happen, made them happen, and then wondered what happened!
Yet here, right in the beginning of the story, God reminds Abraham that despite all that hardship and wandering, God would not back off on his promise. God was still going to bless the world through Abraham’s offspring, even when those offspring weren’t as faithful as their patriarch. Our sin is always debilitating but God’s grace is always liberating. Even in the midst of the worst of our brokenness, God comes with an offer to come home, to receive forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation, and then to walk again in faith. While we don’t know what the future holds, what we do know is that God’s constant promise to Abraham and his descendants, including his spiritual offspring, is always in force: “I will be with you” (Genesis 26:3).
“There are two kinds of people: those who think they can and those who think they can’t, and they’re both right” – Henry Ford
Faith requires that we be willing to surrender ourselves to God and his will, trusting that God will keep his promises. Abraham’s story tells us that faith is less of a leap than it is a single step in a God-ordained direction. If we think we can take that step, then we need to recognize that it won’t be easy. If we think we can’t take the step of faith, then we need to lean in and listen to God even more closely. We won’t know for sure, however, until we take the first step!
God gave Abraham a God-sized dream—one that he could not accomplish without God’s help. Those are actually the dreams that move God’s purposes forward in the world. Too often, however, we settle for what we think we can do on our own. When you read that list of faithful people in Hebrews 11, you begin to realize that God was actually calling them to do the impossible, which is usually the task to which God calls his people. And God does this because in those situations, his glory and power can shine through. Jesus told his disciples that they would do even greater things than he did. Most of us read that verse and believe that to be impossible, but we believe that because we think we can’t. We forget that if God is behind the project, great things will happen for which we can never get the credit. Are you willing to believe that God can do great things through you? Are you willing to take on a God-sized dream for your life?
The life of faith is the life we’ve been called to—a life that takes single steps in God’s appointed direction. As we said last week in looking at the Tower of Babel story, the impulse of sinful humanity is to cluster, to use the word “Come” as a mantra—come, be like us; come try this out; come and enjoy the blessings God has given to you. But the operative word in the Abraham story is “Go”—go into all the world; go to the place God will show you; go and spread his blessings abroad; go and risk it all for God’s mission in the world; to be a “Thy will be done” people rather than a “Have it your way” people. There are two kinds of people. Which kind of people are you?
Note: This sermon is adapted from one I wrote for the January/February 2013 issue of Homiletics. To subscribe, click here.
